The Future of Scribnia
This is a guest post from David Spinks.
David is the Community Manager for Scribnia. With a passion for the power of social web communities, he has utilized his knowledge of community building to establish a professional career in the social media field.
He authors a blog at www.davidspinks.com and contributes to the Scribnia Blog.
Watching Scribnia develop into a strong and loyal community has been very exciting.
We’ve enjoyed the loyal activity of some very enthusiastic alpha users who have contributed a lot of quality reviews and have been able to find new bloggers in their industries.
I’d like to share with you where we plan on going with Scribnia and how I will play a role as community manager.
We’re looking to continue to develop Scribnia as a valuable tool for bloggers and their communities. By giving the power to the readers, our goal is to really “level the playing field.” So much focus is placed on Google Pagerank and Alexa rankings. This makes it very hard for the “little guy” to gain their due recognition.
As many bloggers know, there are so many awesome blogs out there that you rarely hear about unless they pull in loads of links and visitors.
Through Scribnia, we hope that the blogging and online reading communities can really share those blogs that are truly great.
We’d like to continuously refine our discovery engine in order to provide the best possible, personalized recommendations. This is a tough task but one that we’re very committed to. There are a lot of recommendation engines out there but we’re aiming to differentiate ourselves by using author reviews rather than blog reviews, and really taking into account each user’s personal preferences. We take into account a lot more than “similar content”.
I have a number of roles as Community Manager.
My main role is to bring in users and to get people excited about Scribnia. So far, this hasn’t been a difficult task as bloggers seem to really appreciate the service. It’s a benefit for bloggers to get involved early. The more reviews you have the greater chance you have of being featured as a top blogger, or being chosen as an “Author of the Day”.
We are planning on going public (beta) very soon and hope that our community members will help us get others excited about Scribnia.
The community aspect of Scribnia is one that we’re proud of, and we hope that others will want to be a part of that community. I will be online pretty much all day everyday talking with users, answering any questions, and staying active on the site. If you know me, you know I love conversation! As Community Manager, I have a lot on my plate, but I’m very excited to help the community grow and to connect with our members.
If you’d like to join Scribnia while we’re in alpha, you can email me any time at DavidSpinks@Scribnia.com. You can also follow us on Twitter at @Scribnia.
6 Responses to “The Future of Scribnia”
Thanks a lot Stuart. Really glad to see you using the site to its full potential and finding it valuable. Reaching out to individual bloggers on a personal level is something that I feel is important in building a strong blogging community. I hope that like you, myself, and many others, bloggers will find it to be a valuable tool and join the community.
Hey David,
Don’t tell Russ, but I’d pretty much forgotten about Scribnia until I saw your post. I had signed up and I think I’m listed as a writer as well.
Looking at the site today, it seems that a lot of the people I like to read are active in the Scribnia community so I think I need to wake up.
If you don’t see me being more active there, feel free to give me a kick from time to time.
Cheers!
DavidDavid,
haha that’s alright. What Russ doesn’t know won’t hurt him ^_^.
Hope that you will start to find Scribnia to be a valuable tool that’s worth returning to. It’s one of those sites that becomes more valuable with use. It can be hard to really grasp it until you’ve messed around with some of the tools. (Something we’re working on)
If you have any questions or need some tips on getting started, you know I’m always here to help.
Look forward to seeing you on the site.
David
I’ll second Stuart’s comment about Scribnia (he’s actually the one who keyed me into it). It’s a terrific site for finding new authors and for speaking your mind about authors you already know. I really like how it has niche specific metrics that allow you to rate each author on what kind of style they have.
Over time as the Scribnia database is built up with reviews it could potentially turn into a Yelp like resource, but for writers instead of restaurants.
Hey there David,
Thank you so much for guesting over here – really appreciate it and it’s great to see the plans that Scribnia have for the future. It’s off to a great start already and I’m sure with you as Community Manager, and Russ and the rest of the team, it should help pave the way to help more bloggers get the recognition they deserve.
Cheers!
I’ve used Scribnia for about 2 months now. I can say that it definitely has the potential to turn into something really special. The attention that they have been giving to reaching out to individual bloggers has been fantastic. I’m not exactly sure where they are going but I’m definitely interested.